Tag Archives: methodology

Here’s one I didn’t publish at the time for fairly obvious reasons. I’ve no recollection now, five years later, whether whatever it was did pan out as I predicted, partly because my memories of 2008 mainly comprise the banking crisis. I am making this post public in 2013, but backdating it to its original date in March 2008.

Schadenfreude, or taking pleasure in others’ pain, isn’t pretty, but by god it can feel good.

It was inappropriate of me to snigger at the end of last week when the system that went live last month fell over. It was wrong of me to be amused that the patronising assurances we’d been fed for months that it could never happen here were embarrassingly and publicly falsified. It was nasty of me to find it funny when the centrifugal force of the spin doctoring failed to deliver on the promises that any problems would be treated as a Type 1 incident.

Oh dearie me, dearie me, dearie me. It was wrongest of all for me not to give a flying f*** if the system as a whole ends up pulled as a result of going belly up last week.

You see, I can be a judgemental and vindictive cow, and I find professional sloppiness unnecessary and disgusting. I have spent months feeling uncomfortable, watching corners being cut, political games being played, a lack of progress being spun into news of progress and a sense of “them” and “us” being created. I also have a strong sense of cause and effect. I believe in consequences. So it was grimly satisfying to know that the clucking and squawking last week was the sound of a whole flock of headless chickens coming home to roost.

We’ll be knee deep in chicken-shit next week, but by god it’s going to be worth it.